BritBox: The Best British TV

I enjoy many things British, from my vintage-in-my-mind Mini-Cooper S to my Sandringham Butterfly ashtray, to the world of entertainment. In Britbox, I hoped to find two comedy shows I love in particular and classic,dry British comedy in general, plus mysteries and other specials. I have been very pleased to find in general what I hoped to find, which includes many favorites in all genres - the Vicar of Dibley, the delightful Father Brown mysteries, the chief Inspector Jane Tennyson series, Shetland, gardening specials, and the wondrous Christmas walking, train, and double decker tours around/inside grand estates and London, to mention a few. As for the two comedy shows I hoped to find, one has just showed up. Two days ago I discovered one of the two shows I have hoped and hoped would appear is now available - "Miranda". If you like a zany, very creative situation comedy with an unlikely main character and great secondary characters, try "Miranda." Sadly, although very popular, only 3 years of the show were produced. About comedy #2, Listen up Britbox !!! When will the second comedy show I am waiting for - "The Two Ronnies" - show up??? Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Hazelhurst created one of the driest of the dry comedy shows back in the 1960's or 1970's, and it is nowhere to be found. I have have encountered no problems no with the app (I watch on an apple iPad Pro 13.9"), I appreciate that the search function produces meaningful and not extraneous hits, and the programming content is very good. Dont expect all content to be perfect. No film/show app is perfect, they all offer some trivial shows. But I think Britbox is very good, and I strongly recommend it.

I love Britbox but hate the app. It seems to glitch and have playback errors on a weekly basis. Most important issue though, I need closed captioning to watch tv, and Britbox, while it does have it, has it in a separate link for each episode. Not only do you have to choose it for each show you watch, you actually have to choose it for each and every episode. It’s exhausting and very tedious. I cannot just “continue watching” from Apple TV or the Brit box app because it will continue with the non-closed captioned link with no option to choose differently or access the main show link. Then it is very difficult to find the show I was watching. At this point you actually have to go back to “all shows” and scroll through them all A-Z or search up the show to find it. Then you have to select season because it doesn’t save your progress and go to the appropriate season and episode that you were on. The interface is very clunky and should do a better job saving your shows. Even on their own app, if I were to click continue watching (which even then picks and chooses which few of your shows to offer this for) it only starts playing the non-closed caption version and gives no way to access the closed caption link for the episode (or access to any of the other episodes for that matter). Pretty much every other TV service offers a simple drop down on a show once you start playing it to choose closed captioning. Why Britbox chose this weird, exhausting method I can’t figure out. The app needs an overhaul. I hope they are working on it because I do enjoy Britbox.

Been a subscriber for a few years now to Britbox and Acorn. I enjoy both and find value in both. I am into the mysteries and comedy shows with the occasional history show throw in. I do wish there was more options or deeper trove of shows across UK, NZ, AUS and Canada. Especially options of shows from the late 90s early 00s. I have watched just about everything on both services except the soaps and the morning shows. I find the closed captions are quite glitchy. I have a hearing loss in one ear then add in some accents are difficult to understand to my American ear I can find it quite difficult to follow the story without the captions. Several times the wrong closed captions have appeared for the entire show in a series, the captions belonged to a different episode, they had been flipped. Other times it was clear that most of the dialogue was off script as the captions didn’t match at all what was on the screen. When I contacted them they said they couldn’t do anything about it. Which I find quite odd.